When it was all over, I could go home again. Gael was sure that I was stable enough to stay away from the addictions that kept me in their thrall. He was unaware that I hadn’t let them go for even a single full day. I drove to the bar when my apartment became too big and empty, ordering my drink and waiting for the bartender to get around to making it.

I lifted my eyes to the TV, and the last shred of hope died within me. People around me stared, whispering to each other and pointing at me from the dark corners of the bar. I squeezed my eyes shut. The news was covering my video and the court case, a clip of my testimony appearing on the screen. I knew that they’d show it, but I somehow thought I’d escape seeing it all again. I stood before the bartender even pulled the right bottle off of the shelf to pour my drink, and I walked out. I tried to keep a mask of calm, but it was flimsier with each step I took. It seemed every pair of eyes in the bar were fixed on me. When I finally pushed through the door, I was shaking. The darkness of the night threatened to infect me, so I ran to my car to hide from it.

I sped to the liquor store before I got home. The realization came that I couldn’t even enter the studio building with all of my alcohol, so I settled for drinking in my car. I looked up at my apartment window and realized that I didn’t even want to return to that place tonight. It was as dark and lonely as I was. Digitalis sent me a message inviting me to her place, but I refused her. I couldn’t bear to deal with anyone right now. I tried to sound calm in my reply, but the messages were frantic. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t read into them much. She was the center of her own world, and I had no place in that.

I drove to a hotel, drinking as I walked alone up the stairway. I brought the pills I kept in my glove compartment, resolving to have a night alone with my addictions. They were always there when I needed them.

I hated hotel rooms for the mirrors that hung everywhere. Wherever I looked, I saw myself reflected, a broken down mess of a person outlined in a gold-painted frame. I despised every reflection. My skin was pale, my hair unkempt, and circles were forming under my eyes again. My skin was unhealthy from dehydration, my eyes bloodshot from the lack of sleep.

I thought about how I was here, alone in a hotel room with pills and booze, while everyone else I knew was happy, succeeding in everything. Digitalis complained, but she was ecstatic about her independent record deal. Gael was getting married to that girl soon. Absinthe was happy for her girlfriend, who she said was becoming a successful lawyer in the area. They seemed to be close, and it hurt that I never knew about a woman so important to her until they’d been together two years.

Yet, here I was: buzzed, ready to go on a bender, and isolated. All I had was my fame and my beauty. Everything else about me was a hollow facade. I’ve failed everyone around me. I’ll only ever be the slutty addict that the world knows me as. Even attempting sobriety had failed, and I ended up worse than ever. I can’t find it in me to cry as I stare at my vacant eyes in the mirror, looking at a face that never belonged to me.

I should just die.

I looked at my wrists, thinking about how some people slit them to bleed out. I flinched just thinking about bringing a razor so close to my skin. Maybe I could do it when I get high, unable to feel it no matter how deep I had to go.

I remembered that I might not remember to do it when I’m riding on the euphoria. I looked at the pill bottle, and a new idea was born.

The bathroom overwhelms me as I enter with orange and gold that covered it from floor to ceiling. I started the bath, watching numbly as the water pours and splashes into the gold-painted tub. I set the pills and my whiskey bottle beside the tub, and I stirred the water with my fingertips.

***

When I was seventeen, I saw my parents for the last time. My mother sat beside me in a lawyer’s office, her blonde hair blocking her face from my view. I imagined the look she made. It was she who taught me to make a charming smile for those that looked at me. It was her lessons that taught me that if I wanted to be liked, I had to appear kind and happy. As she picked up the pen to sign my emancipation, I imagined that she had that pleasant smile she’d crafted over the course of her lifetime. Even if she’d never see this lawyer again, she’d want him to like her. It was this need for people’s admiration that put us in this office.

Mom’s signatures were perfect and beautiful, and she had a relaxed posture. I loved her, but those affections had chipped away to a one-sided yearning as I realized that she didn’t love me. A year of her subtle, cutting words at the dinner table every night taught me that there was no place left for me in her world.

I was a teenage alcoholic. That didn’t look good to the neighbors.

My father stood behind me, his hands on the back of my chair. He didn’t speak. I sensed his hesitancy when he let my chair go to take his turn signing the papers. He was never like mom. We rarely spoke as I grew up outside of family meals, family outings, and the occasional evening movie. He left for business trips often. Even when dad was home, he was too busy to spend much time on me. Even so, he loved me. For a while, he opened his office door and let me watch him work. For a while, we were as close as a father and son could be. The first time I’d seen the man smile in my lifetime, he was showing me spreadsheets, teaching me about his job with a passion I’d never witnessed before.

The most wonderful time of my childhood was when I was close to him. As distant as we’d grown, I still yearned for my father’s affection. In the shaking of his hand as he signed the documents, I saw he didn’t want to let me go, either. The signatures he left on the paper were twisted and deformed imitations of the ones I’d seen in his office.

I looked into my lap as he finished, closing my hands into fists to stop their trembling. Before he put the pen to paper, I’d hoped that Dad would take my side. I’d hoped that he’d refuse to sign because he wouldn’t want to abandon me. Instead, he was pulling his hand away from signed papers, my mother’s firm hand on his arm, tense beneath her fingers. He always did things her way. The day his office door was closed in my face was the day that mom made other plans for me. Mother said I had years before I would need to worry about a career. She thought that my youthful face would raise donations to the causes she worked for. She wanted to hear the neighbors gush about her wonderful parenting, proven by my willingness to work for charity at her side. She didn’t care that my time with my father was so important to me.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Again, dad closed a door in my face, with my mother’s wishes behind the act. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t cry in here. As far as the lawyer knew, I wanted to be removed from my home. I wanted to be alone in the world. As far as anyone outside of my family would know, I chose this to focus on my music career.

I opened my eyes and took my turn with the pen, still warm from my dad’s sweaty hand. As I signed my name, I used the autograph I’d practiced. I heard my mother huff when she saw the stylized signature. It looked nothing like the elegant cursive she’d taught.

I pushed the papers towards the lawyer and raised my gaze to meet my mother’s eyes, the same blue as mine. She gave me that pleasant fake smile, and the sight of it numbed me. My father’s hands were on her shoulders, and she rested her fingers on his wedding ring.

I returned her smile, twisting my lips into the carefree mask she’d taught me. We both rose from our chairs, and I followed her out of the office. Suzie, the manager that Kidex assigned to my band back then, waited in the parking lot to take me to my apartment. I spread myself out on the leather seats of her car, still wearing the facade on my face. As the car started up, I saw my parents arguing in their SUV. My father held his face in his hands. My mother looked cold and annoyed as she started the car.

Suzie rolled smoothly out of the parking lot, and I stared at their car until it left my sight. She played one of my songs to fill the silence, and when I knew that she wasn’t looking, I let my smile die. I bit my lip, and I closed my eyes. I knew that I shouldn’t cry, because Suzie might see, but the tears fell against my wishes.

***

I turn off the water when I hear it splashing onto the floor, and I look at myself in the shimmering reflection. Experimentally, I make my trademark smile. My messy hair and the circles under my eyes set the image apart from my autographed headshots. With that expression, only the emptiness of my eyes serves to show who I really am. No one ever notices the emptiness.

The smile fades and I can’t face my reflection anymore.

I ease myself into the warmth of the water, feeling it embrace me like a hug. The water rises around me and spills over the edges of the tub. I pick up the bottle of pills.

***

I was fourteen when I’d seen an overdose for the first time. Absinthe’s trailer reeked of stale, cheap beer. She and I were going to meet Gael for a movie, but first she insisted that we check on her mom. She said that she’d been drinking more lately, and she was worried that she’d fallen asleep on her stomach again, as she often did. Instead of a slumbering woman, we opened the door to a nightmare.

On the floor, Absinthe’s mother jerked like a fish out of water. A needle shook loose from her arm, and she drooled onto the floor. I froze, my eyes widening at the sight. Absinthe screamed and rushed to her mother’s side, her hand fumbling for her phone. When her mom’s elbow hit the coffee table, an avalanche of empty beer cans and TV dinner trays fell to the floor. Her bony legs shook against the carpet, illuminated by the light of Absinthe’s phone. Absinthe sobbed as she shrieked into the phone, but I didn’t hear the words. I felt weak and lightheaded. I lowered myself to the ground, but my view of her mother was only clearer from down here. Her eyes were vacant, with tiny specks for pupils. Her hands were tense claws with blue fingertips.

Looking at her was the same as watching someone die. Absinthe collapsed into my arms when the paramedics poured into the little room. Even the act of saving her appeared violent, the way they shoved another needle into her body when they spotted the one on the floor. I held Absinthe closely, but the way she shook in my arms put me on edge after the sight I’d seen. I had to pull away and look down into her wet eyes to make sure that she wasn’t dying, too.

We collapsed against each other again. That night, I’d witnessed something that had kept me terrified for years.

I never thought that I’d desire that sort of outcome, someday.

***

A bitter aftertaste clings to my mouth, untouched by the whiskey that I drank to wash it away. The empty orange pill bottle floats somewhere around my knees. I wait to fade away as the first part of the high hits me, my last illusion of happiness. My hand relaxes, and the sound of dancing glass on the tile fills my ears before it all turns hazy…

***

Digitalis:

Asya was especially strange tonight at the party. I noticed how he sat alone all evening, how he seemed withdrawn from the rest of us. I remember the way he studied those flowers that Gael’s girlfriend gave him, as if she’d handed him someone’s severed hand. Later in the night, too, when I asked him to come back and hang out with me, he seemed odd. It wasn’t like he always stayed over when I invited him, but never had I received an answer as scrambled as the one he sent me. He rarely gave excuses, but in this message, he rambled about needing to go somewhere. When I asked him if he’d been drinking, he never responded. It was rare that I worried about him, but something seemed very wrong about the way the night was going. Even the sky, as I looked out my window, was the oddest portrait of red and orange as it faded into darkness.

Before I was even thinking, I was going into my car, and my hands hardly even noticed the keys gripped in them. I opened the new app that the label was using to monitor all of us after Asya’s video surfaced. His icon showed that he was in a hotel, nowhere near where we usually went to bar hop. The streets were ominous and barren as I drove in this unknown part of the city, making me feel only more anxious.

I read and reread the texts as I climbed the stairs to the room that the front desk attendant claimed he had rented. When I approached the room, I was disturbed to see that I wouldn’t even need to knock. He’d entered with such reckless abandon that the door was just resting beside the frame, open. Gently, I placed my hands on the door, taking in a breath. When I pushed it open, I smelled the potent scent of whiskey like a barrage to my nose. The air was humid. A loud, violent splashing came from the bathroom. My veins filled with razors. In a moment of paranoia, I envisioned him being brutally drowned by some lunatic fan.

The air breezed past me as I reached the bathroom. I stop for only a moment at the sight of water seeping from under the door, a light brown color from the spilled whiskey nearby. I took in that image before I burst into the bathroom, the bright orange paint attacking my eyes. The sounds of splashing and banging were louder.

At first I didn’t believe my eyes. There he was, seizing in the tub, the broken glass of a fallen whiskey bottle below his jerking hand outside the bathtub. His eyes were half-closed, his body looking almost possessed. He didn’t seem to breathe, but moved too much to tell.

I became immobilized, then. All I could do was stare, his bright blue hair slapping wetly against the golden rim of the tub over and over.

I took in a breath. I pulled out my phone. I called an ambulance.

Then, I cautiously tiptoed to his side as my eyes gave life to tears. My hands shook as I reached out, too focused on him to care about the glass that scratched at my expensive boots. He kept thrashing around and I couldn’t stop him.

I couldn’t stop him.

His eyes were open just a sliver to show me their vacantness.

I knelt beside the tub in the spilled water, clinging to the edge. There was no way for me to help. I couldn’t stop the seizing. I couldn’t hold him down to give him breath. I couldn’t calm him. I couldn’t save him.

Sirens sounded outside, and I knew that they were for Asya.

I took his hand and waited with him for his saviors.